Fair Food Fight Films: Soylent Green

This week, I take a look at science-fiction’s best food movie, Soylent Green. Because nothing says delicious like an agrarian apocalypse, am I right?

In a near-apocalyptic, globally-devastated society where beef can only be bought on the black market and soylent tablets are the only thing between the masses and starvation, food has never been more important. So, come and look into the future with me! …and then get completely drunk to drown your sorrows , because wow, will you need it.

The plot of Soylent Green is standard-issue film noir: grizzled cop barely keeping his head above water finds himself at a crime scene that’s more significant than it seems. As he unravels the mystery, the stakes get higher, and soon he’ll have to go up against other cops, his own friends, and maybe even the woman he loves! (Not that last thing. I got carried away. He doesn’t love her whatsoever, and is a rapist.)

Before I get to the big twist (which is no longer a twist since it’s one of the best-known movie moments in the entire world), this is the world of the film. The middle-class, like cop Thorn, and research-types called “books,” live as domestic partners in little apartments.Now, I’m not saying Thorn and his particular friend Sol are gay; I’m just saying that every conversation they ever have is about how much they love/need each other.

Here they are, sniffing their black-market margarine to see if it’s gone bad. (It has. They eat it anyway, on chips of Soylent Red.)

Sadly, they’re luck y and they know it, because their stairs are packed with people with nowhere else to live, and the world outside their window looks like this:

Overpopulated, overheated, and always one outburst away from a riot, the city survives only because of government-doled Soylent tablets to cover all your nutrition needs, made of delicious soy, lentils, and plankton. *WINK*

At the plebian market, the only affordable food options are some soylent buns…

And dust-covered, delicious, vegetarian Soylent Green! WINK.

Of course, this horrifyingly meager existence doesn’t affect everyone, never fear! The rich are going to be juuust fine.

They have Galaga to comfort them!

The movie is actually pretty sneaky about this introduction, because the lady playing the game is Shirl, who we think at first is a privileged trophy wife. Only as the movie goes on do we realize she (and most other women) are referred to as “furniture,” and she actually comes with the unit, so her contentment here is just because the dude who owns her doesn’t happen to be abusive.

Of course, that all changes when she meets Thorn, who shows up at the crime scene and robs the cupboards bare. Shirl can’t do much about it, since she’s not so much a person with rights as she is the property of the building, the new tenant, and apparently Thorn, who shows up during a party and orders her into the bedroom for sex. Your hero, ladies and gentlemen!

(Now I’m sad I hated on Aaron Eckhart in No Reservations so much, because the dude may have been a smarmy jerk, but he also never ordered a woman to sex him, which apparently we have to take into consideration.)

This is the grocery haul which Thorn smuggles home with him. When she buys it, it costs something like $215. (They went to Whole Foods.)

Thorn brings the goods home to Sol, who cooks them up into a meal the likes of which Thorn has clearly never had before, and the two have a near-silent, tearful meal of chili and fruit – both of which Thorn is tasting for the first time.

And, as the plot thickens (much like a good chili!) and Sol finds the reason why Soylent Green can be produced in such abundance when there’s so little nature left, it’s just as well they enjoyed this meal, because they’re going to be queasy for the rest of their lives.

Of course, what Sol discovers is that the seas have become a largely-dead zone, and Soylent Green is, in fact, made from human remains. He decides to kill himself rather than inform his friend, so Thorn gets to ride around in a garbage truck for half an hour before finding out what’s going on. Thorn, violently disturbed by what he’s found, returns to the city with this knowledge, but is wounded and carried away before anything comes of it, leaving the movie in narrative limbo.

I’m going to be honest: when I first saw this movie as a kid, it scared the absolute hell out of me, but not because of the big reveal; given all the rest of the horrors of this world, I didn’t see what the big problem was with Soylent Green. As an adult, I still don’t. Not that I’m a huge supporter of cannibalism, but when you have no other resources, and a steady supply of nutritious meat coming down the pike, it seems wasteful – even irresponsible – not to make use of the available resources to support those who are still living. Get off the cross, we need the wood, you know?

Soylent Green has caught a lot of flak because the final over-the-top reveal (largely thanks to Charlton Heston, who knows how to be a movie star but whose acting tends to the stilted), to the point that it’s usually mentioned only as a punchline. And that’s really a shame, since it’s a genuinely disturbing science-fiction classic that reads less like fiction and more like a documentary from the future. Its energy shortages, food shortages, and painfully stratified class system are all so close to home that watching the movie is a discomfiting experience that should be people who claim not to understand the importance or necessity of long-term sustainability solutions.

How about it, Fighters? Is Soylent Green the movie that makes someone vegetarian, or just another sci-fi flick that won’t be appreciated until its future has come to pass?